• by Karl Greenberg , February 28, 2011

Earlier this year, BMW of North America launched a documentary series, "Wherever You Want To Go: Four Films about the Future of Mobility," the first in a series of "BMW Documentaries."

It's all part of a program in BMW's North American market to gear up for the launch of BMW's raft of hybrid and electric vehicles coming down the pike. The effort includes a social media program called "Activate the Future" and a real-world test-drive program for ActiveE -- an electric car that presages the first such car -- the BMW i3 car, due to market in 2013. The campaign also aligns with the automaker's global introduction of an electric/hybrid sub-brand, "BMW i," which is both about the alternative-powertrain cars and the automaker's venture capital program to fund urban-navigation and communications start-ups.

The BMW Documentaries, one of which was introduced each Tuesday last month, feature the kinds of thought leaders one would expect to see making the rounds at TED conferences, or Davos. They feature the likes of Syd Mead, the futurist and conceptual designer for Blade Runner; Marissa Mayer, VP of location services at Google; Chris Brogan, president and CEO, Human Business Works; and astronaut Buzz Aldrin, airing their views about the future of urban mobility.

"We are trying to start a dialogue early on with lots of people in various social media platforms," says Rich Steinberg, who is BMW of North America's manager of electric vehicle operations and strategy. He tells Marketing Daily that the popularity of the participants in the documentary constitute a built-in marketing program obviating a requirement on BMW's part to heavily promote the films. "These are recognizable people with popular blogs and lots of their own followers," he notes.

The videos, developed with Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, will lead into a social-media program called "Activate The Future," a kind of intellectual crowdsourcing effort (BMW calls it "Collective Engineering") designed to build a community of forward-thinking people who will participate in BMW-hosted forums.

BMW will begin leasing the ActiveE vehicle this summer to such people in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento, and Connecticut. Program participants will be encouraged by BMW to contribute real-time qualitative and quantitative data to BMWActivateTheFuture.com.

Steinberg says the ActiveE car is the second phase of a three-phase electric vehicle development plan that started with the Mini E in 2009. The company brought about 450 of those vehicles to the U.S., and allowed people to lease them for brief periods to gauge consumer response.

The results were encouraging, particularly around issues like "range anxiety" -- drivers' fears that an electric car will strand them somewhere. "They wound up looking for excuses to drive the vehicle," he says. "The only problem was the vehicle's two-seat configuration and lack of storage. We are addressing both shortcomings with the new vehicle."